It is well known that soothing a tired, crying, and/or upset infant is often a challenging, time-consuming part of child rearing. This is particularly true during the first few years of a child's life, before and while learning to talk, as crying may be a baby's primary means of expression.
It has been said that infants have an uncanny ability to require whatever mode of soothing results in the greatest amount of work for the parent in any particular situation. Thus, for example, a parent may lift and cradle a crying infant in his/her arms while sitting. The infant may be comforted and stop crying for a while. Shortly, though, the infant may resume crying and require rocking or a light bouncing motion to be further consoled. Eventually, the parent may be required to transition to a standing or a walking state to further comfort the infant. Often a difficult situation frequently arises at the end of an infant's wakeful period. The baby may becomes fussy, tired, and ready to sleep, but cannot because he/she is crying. Some parents even report having to go to the extreme of taking an infant for an automobile ride to lull her/him to sleep. Doing so is apparently often effective, but may result in considerable time and expense.
As the pace of life accelerates, the time and patience required of exhausted two working-parent families to sooth infant children may contribute substantially to family stress. Various soothing aids and devices have been suggested and marketed to assist parents with the above-described burdens of parenting infant children. For example, wind-up or electric powered baby swings may entertain an infant for a period of time but are often ineffective in lulling the infant to sleep. Motion-creating infant carriers that are fixed in space, with fixed feet to be placed on the floor or on a table, for example, are known. Such products may have limited effectiveness and may be subject to habituation, as they provide insufficient diversity in both range of acceleration motion and in a target infant's field-of-view. Thus, there exists a long-felt but largely unsatisfied need for a device capable of effectively standing in for labor-intensive parental soothing when required.